Galaxy Mirror Glaze Cake

My friend Erin was in town for a short bit, and offered to help me with a post by taking pictures and whatever else was needed. I decided this would be a great opportunity to try my hand at a galaxy mirror glaze cake. She had never done a mirror glaze, and I had only done a similar thing once, poorly, for a thanksgiving dessert last year. We were so excited to experiment!

We decided to focus on the glazing of the cake, so I made the cake ahead of time. I froze the cake beforehand so we could glaze it. Unfortunately, my buttercream didn’t come out as silky smooth as I was hoping. I smoothed it out with a warm knife after taking it out of the freezer.

Once Erin, with her enthusiasm and extra camera showed up, we got to making a glaze. I’d done a little research, and cobbled together a glaze recipe that mostly pulled from a Tasty recipe that I’d found online. The basics of the glaze are pretty much universal: gelatin, white chocolate, sweetened condensed milk, water, and sugar. I discovered that I didn’t have enough powdered gelatin for some of the online recipes I’d found, so I had to look specifically for a recipe that had sheet gelatin.

I’ve never used sheet gelatin. It’s really cool, and weird, and once you’ve soaked it…you have to squeeze it out. If you have a texture thing, this could be pretty squick-y. It also makes funny noises, so that entertained our juvenile sides.

After making the glaze itself, it was time to color! I figured using gel paste colors is less likely to thin the glaze, so we could get bolder colors, like black.  I was not disappointed.

I got help coloring everything because all of the recipes say you have a small temperature window to actually pour your glaze (between 90 and 95F). Once all of the bowls were colored, I checked temperatures in each bowl to see where we were. I knew the colors would layer in the bigger bowl, but the one thing I’d forgotten is that you need to pour them in the opposite order you want them on the cake. I put the black in first instead of last. We figured if it looked awful, I could talk about lessons learned.

Just about the time I finished pouring the pink glaze, my alarm went off reminding me to pick my son up from preschool.  I bring this up, because I want to mention that maybe what we did was a terrible thing, but life happens while you bake.  It took about 20 minutes total, so of course by the time I got back the glaze was no longer at the proper pouring temperature. A couple of zaps in the microwave later, and we were back in business!

Seriously, pouring this stuff was like a lovely color therapy, and I don’t think any of us regretted the color order in the end. We kept oohing and ahhing at the colors and shapes that were coming out in the galaxy mirror glaze.

It was so shiny and smooth and drippy, we kept saying things like, “Holy crap, this is amazing!” “OMG, this is the coolest thing ever!!!” and other really excited things like that.

The top of the cake shifted and changed even after we stopped pouring, simply because it wasn’t set. It kept cascading down the sides a bit, until the cold set everything. After waiting for the glaze to set, we got really excited to see just how shiny it was. It started with Erin cackling about how she could see me doing stupid things reflected in the cake, and ended with us taking this awesome reflection picture of me and Sarah.

Trimming the drips probably wasn’t supposed to be difficult. I blame our distraction by the gorgeous colors of this glaze for why we let the drips set too long. I didn’t do too much damage to the overall mirror glaze when I did actually remove the drips, so I’m calling it a win.

Now, this is a galaxy mirror glaze cake, and what’s a galaxy without stars? I did a little experiment with straight white food coloring, and discovered it worked fine, so I used one of my food paint brushes and did some splatter art for the stars.

The more we looked at the cake, the more we realized that it almost looked like a night landscape picture: a mountain range with the aurora in the sky behind them. The more I stared, the more I couldn’t see anything else. So, in the spirit of our theme, behold the mountains of Gallifrey!